Read Any Good Books Lately? by Peter Leyland

Read Any Good Books Lately?

 

Well, yes, is the answer. I’ve been working through the books I got for Xmas. There was good, there was disappointing and there was in between; and there was one which was not a present, but which was retrieved from a second-hand shop and was considerably enhanced by an excellent reading on audiobooks given by the actor, Juliet Stevenson.

 

I’ll start with the first one, Small Bomb at Dimperley, by Lissa Evans. I did enjoy this book, possibly because I had a slight connection with the author: a couple of years ago I had taken a small part in a Radio 4, Bookclub broadcast on her excellent novel, Old Baggage. For this I had to send some questions to the producer, Dymphna Flynn and was able to put one to Lissa on live radio.

 

Anyway, before I get carried away with my five-minute radio stardom, let’s get back to the book that I got for Xmas: Small Bomb at Dimperley is set in 1945 after a Labour landslide victory at the polls. Ring any bells? The novel is set in Buckinghamshire, an area which I know well, and concerns the fortunes of an aristocratic family, the Vere-Thissetts, who have survived the war and are looking to make a new start in a world that is very different from the one that existed before. The younger son, Valentine is dealing with the fallout following the events of the war, such as the requisitioning of the family house and the death of his brother, the eldest son, who was the natural heir to the estate. 

 

Despite the wartime themes there is much comedy amidst the action, such as a satirical description of the de Vere house in a National Trust style, and the explosion of the bomb itself. This is undercut by darker ideas like the reader’s gradual realisation that Ceddy, the youngest son, is suffering mental illness caused by a brain infection in his childhood. The condition is handled sensitively by the author as are other examples of mental affliction: Valentine’s depression is partly caused by his damaged hand, which was the result a freak wartime accident, and he has spent his time since the war, hoping to find a suitable wife to carry on the family name. A man, says his mother, really ought to have a wife ‘Or he simply falls to pieces.’

 

By the end of the book I was really pleased see Valentine in what seems like a permanent relationship with Zena, an evacuee with a small daughter, who is secretary to his uncle, Alaric. Again, the author introduces this idea to the reader gradually and when Yvonne Jane Maberly breaks off an arranged engagement between their two families to become a nun, we are left thinking that Valentine may always be on his own. I am sure I am not the only reader who was pleased with the projected outcome to be his relationship with Zena. Some of us do like those happy-ever-after endings, having ourselves experienced such depression when emotional life looked grim.

 

My second Xmas read was not so enjoyable. This was the Booker Prize Winning Orbital by Samantha Harvey, a novel highly praised by all the judges and yet one that left me disappointed. If you might occasionally read a book that just does not connect with you, then this was one for me. The characters, six astronauts talking to each other while on a space journey rotating the earth, did not come to life and the connections between them was to my mind non-existent. I much preferred Held by Anne Michaels, one of the Booker shortlisted books, which I had read a couple of times because of the beauty of her writing.

 

The reading of my Xmas books was interrupted when I came across The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing in the second hand shop at Stowe Gardens, a book I had been looking-for, for ages. It was a hefty tome, nearly 600 pages, and I thought it would be a good idea to try reading it as an audio book. I had discovered how to use earpieces for this and was able to listen to it on my i-phone. The reader of the text was the actor, Juliet Stevenson.

 

The Golden Notebook published in 1962 is the story of Anna Wulf, a writer, who is telling about her life in a series of coloured notebooks, interspersed with sections from a shorter novel called Free Woman. This is a quotation from Lessing’s preface to the book:

 

“There is a skeleton, or frame called Free Women, which is a conventional short novel…But it is divided unto sections and separated by stages of the four notebooks, Black, Red, Yellow and Blue. The Notebooks are kept by Anna Wulf, a central character of Free Women. She keeps four, and not one because, as she recognises, she has to separate things off from each other, out of fear of formlessness – of breakdown. …from their fragments can come something new,The Golden Notebook.”

 

The 'fragments' are an advanced form of writing about politics, sexuality, philosophy, feminism, therapy, and relationships - areas, some of which would not be fully explored in fiction until the 1970s. What held it together for me was the brilliant reading by Stevenson, who used a different voice pitch for each of the characters and kept a level pace in her reading through some often-challenging content. I kept remembering that the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover had only just happened in 1960, and that Doris Lessing must have been aware that she was breaking fictional boundaries, which were only truly breached more than a decade later in books like The Women’s Room by Marilyn French. A writing friend on hearing I was reading The Golden Notebook said, ‘I loved it but did feel I was going mad as I read it.’

 

My final Xmas book was a factual rather than a fictional one, but it raises all sorts of questions regarding fiction. In 2009 I taught a course on the writer, Flora Thompson, who had been born in the area around Buckingham where I now live.* I had undertaken to give a talk about Flora to the local conservation group and needed to update my knowledge, so to this end I had asked for a book called Dreams of the Good Life by Richard Mabey, a book about the life of Flora and the creation of Lark Rise to Candleford, her most well-known piece of work.

 

Mabey’s book is the story of how a working-class woman with only a basic education but with an interest in natural history, an abiding memory of her childhood and a keen desire to widen her experience of the world became what she wanted to be – a writer. Lark Rise to Candleford was such a stylistically unusual book that at first the publishers did not know how to categorise it. Was it fiction or autobiography and how should it be sold to the public? Flora Thompson herself would have had very little say in the matter as she died in 1947 only two years after the publication of her three-book series.

 

Mabey takes a new look at how Flora Thompson fictionalises herself in the character of Laura, the local junior post mistress. He shows her creation of the character to be in part the creative culmination of several magazine articles she had written about natural history which she had called The Peverel Papers. He explains that the Peverel Society encouraged communication between writers, especially those with literary aspirations and that the society was ‘an outgrowth of the scientifically respectable exchange societies which had begun to flourish in the Victorian era’. Flora’s membership must have fuelled her confidence in the writing of the articles which she was much later at the age of sixty to transpose into the creation of the fictional characters of ‘Lark Rise’.

 

My talk about Flora Thompson, was well received, although I was very conscious of the fact that I hadn’t given a presentation for over two years and was a little rusty. However, I was sent a lovely card by the secretary of the conservation group the next day, thanking me and saying: ‘It was refreshing to hear about the real Flora as opposed to her fictional life. You brought to light the great advantage of book reading which gave her the opportunity to lead a fulfilled life.’

 

I do believe book reading does exactly that, and even as I have been writing this three more books have arrived: My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel (1927), Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (2009) by Satoshi Yagisawa, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (2009). I am wondering which I should read first, or have you my readers any suggestions as you trawl through your own catch of Xmas books?

References

The Women's Room (1977) by Marilyn French

Small Bomb at Dimperley (2024) and Old Baggage (2018) by Lissa Evans

Orbital by Samantha Harvey (2023)

Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence(1928) and (1960)

The Golden Notebook (1962) by Doris Lessing (1962)

Dreams of the Good Life by Richard Mabey (2014)

Held by Anne Michaels (2023)

Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson (1945)

* "On the Flora Thompson Trail" by Peter Leyland in Authors Electric, September 2nd 2022